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“In Ch’an, the process of thoughts appearing and disappearing manifests Taoism’s generative cosmology, reveals it there within the mind. And with this comes the realization that the cosmology of Absence and Presence defines consciousness too, where thoughts are forms of Presence emerging from and vanishing back into Absence, exactly as the ten thousand things of the empirical world do. That is, consciousness is part of the same cosmological tissue as the empirical world, with thoughts emerging from the same generative emptiness as the ten thousand things.”
― China Root: Taoism, Ch’an, and Original Zen
― China Root: Taoism, Ch’an, and Original Zen
“But the universe, all of it, almost everywhere, is 99 percent hydrogen and helium,* the two simplest elements. Helium, in fact, was detected on the Sun before it was found on the Earth—hence its name (from Helios, one of the Greek sun gods). Might the other chemical elements have somehow evolved from hydrogen and helium? To balance the electrical repulsion, pieces of nuclear matter would have to be brought very close together so that the short-range nuclear forces are engaged. This can happen only at very high temperatures where the particles are moving so fast that the repulsive force does not have time to act—temperatures of tens of millions of degrees. In nature, such high temperatures and attendant high pressures are common only in the insides of the stars.”
― Cosmos
― Cosmos
“The problems of simultaneity do not apply to sound as they do to light because sound is propagated through some material medium, usually air. The sound wave that reaches you when a friend is talking is the motion of molecules in the air. Light, however, travels in a vacuum. There are restrictions on how molecules of air can move which do not apply to a vacuum. Light from the Sun reaches us across the intervening empty space, but no matter how carefully we listen, we do not hear the crackle of sunspots or the thunder of the solar flares. It was once thought, in the days before relativity, that light did propagate through a special medium that permeated all of space, called “the luminiferous aether.” But the famous Michelson-Morley experiment demonstrated that such an aether does not exist.”
― Cosmos
― Cosmos
“The neutrons, as we have said and as their name suggests, carry no electrical charge. The protons have a positive charge and the electrons an equal negative charge. The attraction between the unlike charges of electrons and protons is what holds the atom together. Since each atom is electrically neutral, the number of protons in the nucleus must exactly equal the number of electrons in the electron cloud. The chemistry of an atom depends only on the number of electrons, which equals the number of protons, and which is called the atomic number. Chemistry is simply numbers, an idea Pythagoras would have liked. If you are an atom with one proton, you are hydrogen; two, helium; three, lithium; four, beryllium; five, boron; six, carbon; seven, nitrogen; eight, oxygen; and so on, up to 92 protons, in which case your name is uranium.”
― Cosmos
― Cosmos
“We hear the crack of a bullwhip because its tip is moving faster than the speed of sound, creating a shock wave, a small sonic boom. A thunderclap has a similar origin. It was once thought that airplanes could not travel faster than sound. Today supersonic flight is commonplace. But the light barrier is different from the sound barrier. It is not merely an engineering problem like the one the supersonic airplane solves. It is a fundamental law of Nature, as basic as gravity. And there are no phenomena in our experience—like the crack of the bullwhip or the clap of thunder for sound—to suggest the possibility of traveling in a vacuum faster than light. On the contrary, there is an extremely wide range of experience—with nuclear accelerators and atomic clocks, for example—in precise quantitative agreement with special relativity.”
― Cosmos
― Cosmos
Mark Anthony Sang’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Mark Anthony Sang’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
39 books
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3 friends
1 book
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16 friends
1 book
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18 friends
5 books
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15 friends
1 book
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9 friends
2 books
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11 friends
40 books
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229 friends
16 books
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10 friends
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